Top-Down Multi-agent LLM System with Runtime Data for MISRA C Violation Detection

Abstract

Ensuring MISRA C compliance is crucial for the safety and reliability of embedded software. For this purpose, industries utilize static rule checkers but suffer high ratios of both missed violations and false alarms. Although companies also try to utilize LLMs for this purpose, existing LLM-based approaches have suboptimal performance for large, complex programs. We introduce LASIK, the world-first top-down multi-agent LLM compliance-checking framework for MISRA C, which combines on-demand repository-level context provision with runtime execution evidence. This design enables LASIK to report more true violations than state-of-the-art static analyzers and a naive vanilla LLM approach, while maintaining a low false positive ratio. Our evaluation on 10 embedded projects shows that LASIK detects 1.3-2.7 times more true violations than the static analyzers and the vanilla LLM approach, while achieving the lowest false alarm ratio (26.7%). Furthermore, on an industrial software developed by VPlusLab Inc., LASIK detects up to 2.1 times more true violations with a low false alarm rate (i.e., 10.8%) than the baseline techniques.